The world is a puzzle that has missing pieces

I am a messy person. I have an acute tendency to stack up things… blouse after blouse on the closet door, books, newspapers and magazines on the floor next to my bed, empty shopping bags in the back of the wardrobe, mountains of body lotions and tones of facial products, movies I watched once and I thought I’d watch again but I never do, pens that have finished their life circle long ago, pictures of everything I see around me and the list can go on and on. After a good clean-up of my bedroom, things stay neat and orderly for about… a week or two. Then the piles start rising again. I can attribute this on laziness, definitely, but I think it’s more than that. A licensed and fully awarded psychologist could analyse my way of life and determine all kinds of connexions between my messy room and my childhood or adolescence (it’s what shrinks do you know).

So, as I was trying to push aside all the stuff piled up on my desk this morning, I stopped and I took a metal picture of it all. And then I said to myself “think like a shrink”. It didn’t work immediately. But I had a theme for the day, so I gave it some thought. I haven’t reached any major conclusion untill now, 10 hours later. All I can say is that my life as a whole, my personality, my way of reacting in different situations, my way of thinking probably resembles this messy desk at which I’m sitting right now. Ideas, thoughts, problems I need to resolve are all like all the stuff that lay one on top of each other on my desk. They’ve piled up because I can’t deal with them one at a time. I can’t finish a thought because another one pops out immediately, I can’t keep a good idea because I get busy with something else and I bury it with all the others. I have lots of issues I need to solve, with myself and with others around me. Things to be said, thing to be admitted and things to be forgotten. But I keep them all in a huge mumbo-jumbo of feelings and thoughts, which fill up my mind and my soul like all those stuff fill up my desk. I guess when people say “my life is a mess” they’re probably speaking both literally and metaphorically.

That’s the most important question parents should ask their child. Always. I’m sure the answer will be different each time until the kid finally settles on something. But no matter what the answer is, the parent should do whatever he can to help the child achieve that dream. “I want to be a musician”. Buy him a guitar, take him to music lessons. “I want to be a ballerina”. Take her to ballet classes. “I want to be an astronaut”. Take him to NASA. Ok, that may not be possible, but you’ll think of something. Encourage your kid to dream, to form ideas and plans for the future. Tell him stories about the great men and women in history, watch movies, read books together, experience life with your child. He or she will thank you when he or she will grow up and make that dream come true.

Teach your child how to distinguish right from wrong, but not by yelling “NO” when you see him doing something wrong. Explain, calmly, why that is wrong. Tell him in simple words why he/she has to eat the broccoli and why sugar is good in moderate quantities. Show him/her how to play games on the computer, but also play games outside with him/her. Take field trips, even if you camp outside in the backyard, or even if you only go to the market. Life is an adventure. Let him/her taste it. Encourage him to go out and SEE, HEAR and FEEL. And because time has a way of passing unnoticed, you’ll probably see the results of all these things soon enough.

I found myself fascinated by trees. Yes, you read correctly. Trees. I used to love the way trees look in the summer, all green and glorious, with the sun sparkling between their leaves. I’m still fascinated by the amazing range of colors they take in autumn, from golden-yellow to dark red. But I never stopped to look at the trees when they’re empty, naked. I did that. I was in the bus actually, staring through the window at nothing. The bus just caught a red sign and I looked up at the trees on the side of the road. Hundreds of branches, from big to small, extending from each other in complete harmony. There was order in those branches. And they were almost like a painting, only much more detailed, and almost alive. Each tree had its own pattern, its own shape. I stared at them all the way. I almost forgot to get off the bus.

Trees aren’t the only thing beautiful in nature. Mountains, fields, flowers, oceans. Everything is perfect. Even phenomenons. Rain is both good and destructive. Heat can be pleasant and not so pleasant. Ice incorporates physical perfection, right down to the last molecule. The planet is beautiful, but it can also be defensive. Natural disasters happen more often than we’d like. Man can defend himself from aggressors by initiating wars, by creating weapons and with only brute force. But humans can’t defend themselves from the power of nature.

Tornados, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes. We can build stronger homes, we can hide underground, we can move to areas less prone to this kind of catastrophes. But humans can’t defeat nature. It’s useless to try finding a reason for the disasters that hit the world when we least expect it. We can start an endless analysis of the impact humans have on Earth, on the fact that we drain the natural resources and that nature is “getting back” on us for that. We will never understand the “why”, maybe because there isn’t one in the equation.

Japan was hit by one of the biggest earthquakes in history. The people who were killed, their families and those who suffered material loss didn’t deserve what happened to them. Neither did the people from Haiti or other countries that were hit by something as destructive as the disaster in Japan. The world stood still, in shock, watching live what was happening yesterday, thinking of how unreal, unbelievable it all was. Prayers were sent to those in Japan, governments offered their help and people themselves tried to do as much as they could to ease the suffering of millions of innocent souls that happened to be in the “way” of nature when it decided to show us what it can do.

I just watched the landing of the space shuttle Discovery. It was amazing. I watched for 20 minutes as it approached the landing strip and after the landing. If anyone had seen me, they would have laughed, as I was starring at the screen of my PC, with a dumb huge smile on my face.

The feeling of being proud of something is one of the best feelings one can have. Yes, I was proud. Proud of the crew of Discovery, proud of americans, which managed to do things, to evolve faster and better (I don’t want to offend other nations, but as the title states, it’s my own opinion, my own feelings and thoughts). I was proud, in that moment, of mankind. And my heart twiched at the thought of not being able to share that pride. My own naive brain thinks that all americans were joined today by that feeling of pride and honest happiness. I wish I could be among them. I wish I was there to share exclamations of joy when Discovery touched down. I can’t go that far as to wish I was apart of the crew, or even the ground crew. That would have been possible only if I was born an american. And I’m sure that if I was an american, I would have been apart of that moment. There is nothing better, in life, than to be able to say you helped shape the world as we know it. History has recorded this moment. It will be remembered.